


Some Exclusive Merchandise

by WInger



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: College-aged Characters, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Soft Toys, arcade games, claw machine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 19:07:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8545594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WInger/pseuds/WInger
Summary: They don’t look like him, but Oikawa bird plushies exist, and whoever’s making them is making one hell of a fortune off his dumb fangirls with bad tastes in poorly done animal caricature. That is, Iwaizumi Hajime. ---Up till the moment he pulled out his wallet he still believed that he’d come just to verify and mock the lack of popularity Oikawa’s stupid caricature toy is obviously suffering from – the machine is untouched. … Or not? He had 7 hundred yen coins… To spare. ---





	

When it's past 3am, the minds of anyone still awake starts to act a little different. Rationality takes a back seat for a while and nonsensical whims are entertained – like Iwaizumi, tirelessly playing _Titanfall_ with half his mind reeling from having sent a _miss u, night_ text to Oikawa five minutes ago.

It’s not that he finds it hard to say things like that, but seeing as Oikawa’s will be back the morning after this, maybe he’s overdone a little with the sentiment. 

 _Blame it on the hour,_ his brain assures him, while his game avatar mows down opponent mechs for the kill. ‘Sides, Oikawa loves it when he says shit like that. He’s even left his phone face up, next to him on the couch – physical proof of how little he embarrassment he feels – none, that is.

Therefore it’s for a completely different reason that Iwaizumi’s praying Oikawa doesn’t read it until the next morning – knowing him, he’ll keep himself up over the text rather than rest properly for the match he’s having the next day. _Be asleep,_ Iwaizumi thinks sternly in his head, shooting a warning glare to his phone.

Not a chance. The second he looks the screen lights up defiantly. Iwaizumi procrastinates a while before reluctantly pausing his game and unlocking his phone.  

Only to be utterly confused at Oikawa’s message. It’s an image: a screenshot of some ugly animal caricature plushies. It's so different from what he’d been expecting (see: none, or otherwise a bed selfie would have been appreciated) that it jars him out of the wistful mood he’d been in.  

 _Iwaizumi (3.13 AM):_ wtf?

 _Oikawa (3.13 AM):_ they’re so cute, Iwa-chan!!

 _Oikawa (3.13 AM):_ a caricature baby chick version of ME!

 _Iwaizumi (3.13 AM):_ who the fuck would do something like that

 _Oikawa (3.13 AM):_ it’s to promote interest in the national team! Marketing = funding

He looks at the bizarre things once more, sees nothing that could amount to a resemblance between them and Oikawa’s face, then promptly runs out of patience. _Go the fuck to sleep,_ he texts. This time he puts his phone back facing up.

* * *

 

He wakes up languidly the next morning at half past 11 and simply lounges in bed, enjoying the quiet, until he makes the mistake of picking up his phone. The first thing he’s greeted with is a series of messages from Oikawa, and one of them is a zoomed-in image of the offending critters he’d sent last night. _Look,_ said the excited caption. _It has my expression and hair!!_

His other texts were similar in content – meaningless – so Iwaizumi locks his phone and leaves it on the bed. He has a plan for today, and it involved taking advantage of Oikawa’s absence to shop for new sportswear in complete peace.

But half an hour later he’s back on his phone while he chows down his breakfast protein . He’d only wanted to draw up the image of the outdoorwear he was about to blow cash on; unfortunately, the first image he sees is the damn chicken toy again thanks to Whatsapp’s autosave. He deletes it. Not a second after that Oikawa texts him (like some completely unnecessary telepathy): _Look at those cute things and think of me, Iwa-chan! I’ll be home real soon! Miss you too <3_

 _Go set Ushiwaka’s balls,_ he replies, and flips his phone down on the table.

* * *

 

With a barrage of multiple upset and disgusted emojis, Oikawa leaves him alone for the rest of the day. Iwaizumi goes out to the massive, four-storied Adidas in Shinjuku and browses with all the time and peace in the world, in the end leaving with new training pants, socks, gloves and a tank. Sadly he's gonna have to hide all that new stuff from Oikawa unless he wants about  _shopping_ with _me,_ _Iwa-chan!_ It’s now late afternoon, and as he stands at the crossing, his eyes drift on their own to the brightly lit arcade center on the right.

Before he catches on, Iwaizumi finds that his feet have carried him to the entrance. He only used to come sparingly to these sort of places, and never without the other three. It’s definitely pinker than he remembered, and a lot more like the kind of place high school girls would be caught at rather than a 20-year old college guy like him.

Incredibly, he has to walk through the maze of claw machines (containing some of the ugliest soft toys in the world) while relieving a few nostalgic high-school memories before he realizes that he’s really only here because he’s thinking of Oikawa’s damn birds. He comes to a stop in front of the machine carrying them. 

12 designs, each less than half the size of his palm, all birds of different colors, facial expressions and _hairstyles -_ and feet. He still doesn’t see any similarity between this blatant attempt to con schoolgirls of their money with Oikawa’s physical appearance at all, but the shiny poster tacked on the wall of the machine informs him that the turquoise one with brown flyaway hair is him. He takes in the bird’s wink alongside the tongue sticking out between its _yellow_ _beak_ and judges. Hard.

_"100 yen for 1 play, 500 yen for 6 plays!"_

A quick but thorough glance around shows that he’s alone in this section of the arcade.

Up till the moment he pulled out his wallet he still believed that he’d come just to verify and mock the lack of popularity Oikawa’s stupid caricature toy is obviously suffering from – this machine is untouched.

… Or not? He had 7 hundred yen coins… To spare.

 _To heck with it,_ Iwaizumi decides. It did look easy enough, and if he just tried once it’s not like anyone – like Oikawa – would realize he’s one hundred yen short.

He inserts a coin and the machine emits a jingly tune. The horizontal direction button lights up, and he presses it until it reaches the Oikawa-bird. Then the vertical direction button lights up, and he presses that – the claw hovers above the toy, but a little too far left.

That’s it. The buttons have gone dull and he can’t reposition the claw. Feeling a little baffled by the machine’s inflexibility, he stands back to watch the claw swipe pathetically at the bird’s belly, doing little more than rotating it a few degrees from its original position.

 _That was my bad,_ he thinks, eyebrows coming together. But how was he supposed to know those were one-time buttons? It’s not like he’s a high school girl – now he knows better though. He inserts another coin.

And another, and another. By the time he’s used up his 7 coins – that’s 700 yen – the bird’s moved about 110 degrees and flipped on its back. There’s an underscored 1 printed there, and he sees now that its middle is actually wrapped around with a white band, and decorated on the sides with some thin turquoise stripes. 700 yen invested in it – well he's moved it, at the very least – and he notices that he can change for more coins at the converter machine a few meters away. He hurries to change a thousand note for two 500 yen coins – that’s 12 tries, _if_ he even needed that much. Then he hurries back before some girl could interrupt his progress.

The only strand of rational thought in his head at that point is that he _couldn't just let 700 yen go to waste._ He inserts the 500; the machine informs him he has six plays; and now, finally, he gets to position the claw dead center, above the chick’s semi-horizontal body. The claw grabs it – lifts it – and drops it. Now it’s flipped once more, looking at him, lying on its side, and honestly not that much closer to dropping off the ledge. Iwaizumi looks back at the winking face and feels a sudden surge of irritation from his chest. It’s the smile, he thinks, the one that gives him simultaneous contradictory urges to sock a good one; also, to caress gently and wonder why Oikawa never tried to pursue modelling more seriously.

8th try – the claw strokes the tip of the chick’s head and shifts it by six degrees.

9th try – the claw completely misses and grabs the neighboring bird instead, which also doesn’t achieve lift-off, but rotates on its spot. Maybe he should change targets. The neighboring bird is as ugly but at least it isn’t winking at him.

“Challenging, isn’t it?” A female staff approaches him while he stumps, put off by the difficulty level of a game this simple with toys this stupid. Had she been judging him this whole time? He looks to her distractedly. “Which one are you after?” She prompts, wearing a helpful smile.  

“… Oikawa’s,” he admits reluctantly.

“As expected of Oikawa-san’s popularity, even among the guys!” She comments, unlocking the glass door and manually repositioning the chicks – she rotates them back but swaps the one he’s after with the chick in the middle. “Good luck!” She says.

“Thanks?” The comment was a bit confusing and she just reset all of his previous rotating attempts. He frowns but gets back to business.

The progress with this position plays out identically to the progress that he'd made when the chick was in its last position. The only real change is that this time his sense of frustration doubles. When he’s down to his last two plays he sees the female staff again, through the reflection in the machine’s glass. She’s assisting other customers, so he waits. When she’s done with the gaggles of school girls he stares at her and engages eye contact, silently imploring, silently pleading,  _please don’t make me say please for a bird._

“These things are too small, huh?” She says, coming over and opening the door once more. This time she completely reshuffles the birds; using another one as a base, she inverts the Oikawa-bird and leans it on. “It’s bottom-heavy, so try grabbing it around the back of its middle, here,” she mimes the claw motion around its middle. “So that it’ll tilt forward, okay?”

“Thanks,” he mutters, shamed. He only resumes when she leaves.

Four attempts later and he’s still without a chick. Iwaizumi stares at the insufferable thing – now he _really,_ really gets the resemblance – and fumes. It didn’t work at all. The bird had fallen _backwards_ instead of forward.

“Ah, Oikawa-san…” The staff goes, when Iwaizumi fetches her over. “Not an easy guy, huh?” She unlocks the door for the third time and builds a bigger base with two other chicks; Oikawa-chick leans in the middle where they come together, at a position and angle you could barely consider as still being on the ledge. When she withdraws her hands and closes the glass door she has to do so delicately; it's so close to the edge Iwaizumi feels confident that he can shake the machine and simply watch it fall into the winning zone.

Or not. Maybe it’ll roll to the side inside, because when has Oikawa ever been accommodating? With worn out patience he moves the claw to position and drops it on the bird. As useless and as weak as the grip is, at this point even the brush of a feather would have sufficed – sure enough, the bird tips off the ledge, and he has it, finally. _Finally_ , he has the Oikawa-bird.

But he leaves it lying there. There’s a peculiar feeling washing over him – mildly boiling anger – and he spares it one cursory glance before continuing to finish his remaining plays. Needless to say, he doesn’t clinch another chick with any of those either. But only after then does he bother to retrieve his prize from the machine.

1700 yen over a toy too ugly, too small and too light for him to angrily spike – and boy is he feeling the need to vent. There’s no sense of victory, merely the overwhelming realization that he’d spent _1700 yen_ and fifteen tries on something that the staff had to rig three times in order for him to obtain. No one would be satisfied with a feat of non-achievement as unspectacular as this.

Out in the cold with the abomination grinning cheekily up at him, Iwaizumi does the only reasonable thing  – he crushes the little ugly thing in his spiking hand as he stalks angrily to the train station, fuming at the sheer _waste_ ; alternating between stuffing it into his jeans, swinging it by its chain or sinking his fingers into the smarmy little face and _fake as fuck hair._ He stops after a while, conscious of weirded out stares from passerby’s; as well as unhappy with the notion of probably having to vent on the actual Oikawa if he somehow damages the expensive motherfucker of a toy that he’d given not only money but also time, effort and dignity to.

Iwaizumi reflects on all his life choices the entire journey home. 

* * *

 

He forgets about it. The next day he wakes up blearily when he feels another weight sink into the bed – Oikawa’s back. His boyfriend is in a black sports shirt, resting on one folded arm, fully awake and watching him. The morning sun streams in through the parted curtains and catches on tufts of his hair. The apartment is quiet and Oikawa is content simply with smiling fondly at him.

A vague feeling of annoyance rises at the back of his mind – there’s something he should be holding Oikawa accountable for, Iwaizumi thinks, but for now he’s too sleepy to recall it. Blinking lazily, he lifts a hand and gently touches the side of Oikawa's face. 

“Morning,” Oikawa greets. Iwaizumi hums.

Then Oikawa brings up something small, brown and turquoise to the front of his lips. His smile widens, turns a little cheekier, and he says, “Missed me that much, Iwa-chan?”

Oikawa winks and holds up a bunny with his other hand. The bird, he realizes, is doing the exact same thing.

Iwaizumi twists his cheek and kicks him off the bed.

**Author's Note:**

> Extra: Omitted texts from Oikawa
> 
> Oikawa _(3.20 AM)_ : it has six tufts of hair each on the side  
> Oikawa _(3.20 AM)_ : and the cowlick in the middle on the top!  
> Oikawa _(3.20 AM)_ : it’s like an antenna!!  
> Oikawa _(3.21 AM)_ : look at its expression its one of pure delight  
> Oikawa _(3.21 AM)_ : how on earth did they capture my signature smile so well??  
> Oikawa _(3.21 AM)_ : I make the cutest chick ever  
> Oikawa _(3.21 AM)_ : ^ LOL  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> They say authors write from experience.
> 
>  
> 
> _(Law-evading Rock - by Neru ft. Kanseru & Kettaro)_  
> More author's notes [here](http://wingered.tumblr.com/post/153295828774/damn-birds-fic-author-notes)


End file.
